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American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States and most of Anglophone Canada. ASL is a complete and organized visual language that is expressed by both manual and nonmanual features. Besides North America, dialects of ASL and ASL-based creoles are used in many countries around the world, including much of West Africa and parts of Southeast Asia. ASL is also widely learned as a second language, serving as a lingua franca. ASL is most closely related to French Sign Language (LSF). It has been proposed that ASL is a creole language of LSF, although ASL shows features atypical of creole languages, such as agglutinative morphology.
Fingerspelling is the representation of the letters of a writing system, and sometimes numeral systems, using only the hands. These manual alphabets have often been used in deaf education and have subsequently been adopted as a distinct part of a number of sign languages. There are about forty manual alphabets around the world. Historically, manual alphabets have had a number of additional applications—including use as ciphers, as mnemonics and in silent religious settings.
Sign languages are languages that use the visual-manual modality to convey meaning. Sign languages are expressed through manual articulations in combination with non-manual elements. Sign languages are full-fledged natural languages with their own grammar and lexicon. Sign languages are not universal and are usually not mutually intelligible, although there are also similarities among different sign languages.
International Sign (IS) is a pidgin sign language which is used in a variety of different contexts, particularly at international meetings such as the World Federation of the Deaf (WFD) congress, in some European Union settings, and at some UN conferences, at events such as the Deaflympics, the Miss & Mister Deaf World, and Eurovision, and informally when travelling and socialising.
British Sign Language (BSL) is a sign language used in the United Kingdom (UK), and is the first or preferred language among the Deaf community in the UK. Based on the percentage of people who reported 'using British Sign Language at home' on the 2011 Scottish Census, the British Deaf Association estimates there are 151,000 BSL users in the UK, of which 87,000 are Deaf. By contrast, in the 2011 England and Wales Census 15,000 people living in England and Wales reported themselves using BSL as their main language. People who are not deaf may also use BSL, as hearing relatives of deaf people, sign language interpreters or as a result of other contact with the British Deaf community. The language makes use of space and involves movement of the hands, body, face, and head.
Auslan is the majority sign language of the Australian Deaf community. The term Auslan is a portmanteau of "Australian Sign Language", coined by Trevor Johnston in the 1980s, although the language itself is much older. Auslan is related to British Sign Language (BSL) and New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL); the three have descended from the same parent language, and together comprise the BANZSL language family. Auslan has also been influenced by Irish Sign Language (ISL) and more recently has borrowed signs from American Sign Language (ASL).
The recorded history of sign language in Western societies starts in the 17th century, as a visual language or method of communication, although references to forms of communication using hand gestures date back as far as 5th century BC Greece. Sign language is composed of a system of conventional gestures, mimic, hand signs and finger spelling, plus the use of hand positions to represent the letters of the alphabet. Signs can also represent complete ideas or phrases, not only individual words.
Manually-Coded English (MCE) is a type of sign system that follows direct spoken English. The different codes of MCE vary in the levels of directness in following spoken English grammar. There may also be a combination with other visual clues, such as body language. MCE is typically used in conjunction with direct spoken English.
Japanese Sign Language, also known by the acronym JSL, is the dominant sign language in Japan and is a complete natural language, distinct from but influenced by the spoken Japanese language.
South African Sign Language is the primary sign language used by deaf people in South Africa. The South African government added a National Language Unit for South African Sign Language in 2001. SASL is not the only manual language used in South Africa, but it is the language that is being promoted as the language to be used by the Deaf in South Africa, although Deaf peoples in South Africa historically do not form a single group.
Indo-Pakistani Sign Language (IPSL) is the predominant sign language in the subcontinent of South Asia, used by at least 15 million deaf signers. As with many sign languages, it is difficult to estimate numbers with any certainty, as the Census of India does not list sign languages and most studies have focused on the north and urban areas. As of 2021, it is the most used sign language in the world, and Ethnologue ranks it as the 151st most "spoken" language in the world.
A contact sign language, or contact sign, is a variety or style of language that arises from contact between deaf individuals using a sign language and hearing individuals using an oral language. Contact languages also arise between different sign languages, although the term pidgin rather than contact sign is used to describe such phenomena.
Manually coded languages (MCLs) are a family of gestural communication methods which include gestural spelling as well as constructed languages which directly interpolate the grammar and syntax of oral languages in a gestural-visual form—that is, signed versions of oral languages. Unlike the sign languages that have evolved naturally in deaf communities, these manual codes are the conscious invention of deaf and hearing educators, and as such lack the distinct spatial structures present in native deaf sign languages. MCLs mostly follow the grammar of the oral language—or, more precisely, of the written form of the oral language that they interpolate. They have been mainly used in deaf education in an effort to "represent English on the hands" and by sign language interpreters in K-12 schools, although they have had some influence on deaf sign languages where their implementation was widespread.
Singapore Sign Language, or SgSL, is the native sign language used by the deaf and hard of hearing in Singapore, developed over six decades since the setting up of the first school for the Deaf in 1954. Since Singapore's independence in 1965, the Singapore deaf community has had to adapt to many linguistic changes. Today, the local deaf community recognises Singapore Sign Language (SgSL) as a reflection of Singapore's diverse linguistic culture. SgSL is influenced by Shanghainese Sign Language (SSL), American Sign Language (ASL), Signing Exact English (SEE-II) and locally developed signs. The total number of deaf clients registered with The Singapore Association For The Deaf (SADeaf), an organisation that advocates equal opportunity for the deaf, is 5,756, as of 2014. Among which, only about one-third stated their knowledge of Sign Language.
Nepalese Sign Language or Nepali Sign Language is the main sign language of Nepal. It is a partially standardized language based informally on the variety used in Kathmandu, with some input from varieties from Pokhara and elsewhere. As an indigenous sign language, it is not related to oral Nepali. The Nepali Constitution of 2015 specifically mentions the right to have education in Sign Language for the deaf. Likewise, the newly passed Disability Rights Act of 2072 BS defined language to include "spoken and sign languages and other forms of speechless language." in practice it is recognized by the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Women, Children and Social Welfare, and is used in all schools for the deaf. In addition, there is legislation underway in Nepal which, in line with the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) which Nepal has ratified, should give Nepalese Sign Language equal status with the oral languages of the country.
Claire L Ramsey is an American linguist. Ramsey is an Associate Professor Emerita at the University of California, San Diego. She is an alumna of Gallaudet University and is former instructor at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, Nebraska. Ramsey's research has focused on the sociolinguistics of deaf and signing communities in the US and Mexico.
Ukrainian Sign Language (USL) is the sign language of the deaf community of Ukraine. Ukrainian Sign Language belongs to the family of French sign languages. Worldwide awareness of Ukrainian Sign Language rose sharply in 2014 after the release of a Ukrainian film The Tribe, where actors communicated in Ukrainian Sign Language with no spoken dialogue.
The sociolinguistics of sign languages is the application of sociolinguistic principles to the study of sign languages. The study of sociolinguistics in the American Deaf community did not start until the 1960s. Until recently, the study of sign language and sociolinguistics has existed in two separate domains. Nonetheless, now it is clear that many sociolinguistic aspects do not depend on modality and that the combined examination of sociolinguistics and sign language offers countless opportunities to test and understand sociolinguistic theories. The sociolinguistics of sign languages focuses on the study of the relationship between social variables and linguistic variables and their effect on sign languages. The social variables external from language include age, region, social class, ethnicity, and sex. External factors are social by nature and may correlate with the behavior of the linguistic variable. The choices made of internal linguistic variant forms are systematically constrained by a range of factors at both the linguistic and the social levels. The internal variables are linguistic in nature: a sound, a handshape, and a syntactic structure. What makes the sociolinguistics of sign language different from the sociolinguistics of spoken languages is that sign languages have several variables both internal and external to the language that are unique to the Deaf community. Such variables include the audiological status of a signer's parents, age of acquisition, and educational background. There exist perceptions of socioeconomic status and variation of "grassroots" deaf people and middle-class deaf professionals, but this has not been studied in a systematic way. "The sociolinguistic reality of these perceptions has yet to be explored". Many variations in dialects correspond or reflect the values of particular identities of a community.
Deafness in Cuba encompasses many different topics. There are approximately 109,000 deaf people in Cuba. Some Cuban deaf people learn Cuban Sign Language, while others learn Spanish. Deaf culture is important to deaf people in Cuba.
References
- 1 2 Hoyer, Karin (2007). "Albanian Sign Language: Language contact, International Sign, and gesture". In Quinto-Pozos, David (ed.). Sign Languages in Contact. Washington DC: Gallaudet University Press. pp. 195–234. ISBN 978-1-56368-356-5.
